I had a new one yesterday. During a match (U14G competitive mid-level FWIW), in the second half, the referee held up play, walked over to my sideline, and warned me that I "can't coach on the ball" players. I got a bit testy, told him that was ludicrous. He claimed it was in our State association bylaws. I had hardly said a word to him at that point (he'd called an okay game otherwise), so when he started to get testy back, I clammed up. I still coached my players occasionally when the ball was out of play or clearly away from play, not that I coach a lot "on the ball" in any case. I looked up our bylaws, rules & procedures and Law modifications, and of course no such restriction exists. He was probably conflating it with some "code of conduct" he'd seen, or rules for Silent Saturday which we have occasionally (although even then, I think it's "encouraged" and don't think the referee can enforce it). We all know that coaching on the ball players isn't a best practice--and the players probably don't hear you half the time anyway. But I'm curious if any of you coach in or know of leagues that actually have restrictions on coach/player interaction during games. Anyone?
FIFA Laws restricted it for everyone prior to 1993. No personal knowledge of competition rules restricting the practice after 1993. Over the years I have read articles discussing restrictions on coaching in competition rules. If I remember correctly, a youth club in England went as far as to ban parents from watching within 100 yards of the field. Here in the US, I don't recall ever hearing of a USSF member including even AYSO restricting coaching from the sidelines. It is one of my disappointments. AYSO used to be an organization that I admired for putting the child first. Now they seem to be more interested in competition and winning just like many youth clubs.
I thought I better clarify that I am not being critical of intelligent coaching from the sideline. As for telling players what to do, I learned from playing to never yell at another player to shoot. Instead when there was time, I would calmly in low voice say something like "turn and take the shot." I was acting as another set of eyes, not telling a player to do something that he could see for himself. And when there was time and space to turn behind them, teammates appreciated the help. Especially when they scored, which was the usual result. I absolutely hated when teammates yelled at me to make an obvious pass. Invariably it was while I am trying to misdirect the opposition to open up the passing lane. Invariably it warned the defender that someone was making a blind side run into space behind him. Stupid communication. I didn't run a silent sideline, but I did restrict the sidelines including parents to positive comments only. I had three concepts: 1) positive reinforcement, praising effort, not results, 2) teaching the usual soccer communications (i.e., "man on") and then reinforcing the lesson by using them myself as a 12th set of eyes for the team, 3) appointing co-captains each week who were responsible for the on field coaching (and I let them perform as captains during the matches). In planning the lineups, I helped this along by strategically assigning the more experienced players where they could mentor the others during the run of play. In three years I can recall only 1 occasion when I gave an instruction from the sideline other than substitutions and lineup changes. That one time I told the (U10G) left back while defending in the opponent's half to push up 5 yards because this opponent was not going to clear a ball as far as the other teams we played. I told her to tell the right back to do the same thing. (Actually I phrased it as a possibility ("you could") rather than a command.)
My club's in-house league has a no coaching from the sidelines policy. They've been in place for about 20 years. "Coaches and spectators are also forbidden from providing any instructions to players during the course of a game. Again, positive comments, such as "Good kick, Blue!", are encouraged. ... These rules are designed to minimize excessive involvement of parental egos in what should, after all, be a child-oriented activity. We view these rules as essential to maintaining the positive atmosphere that is fundamental to the league philosophy." When my kids were going through in-house, I'd limit myself to general comments lke "shape blue" or "look around". If I needed to really tell a kid something I'd wait until he came off. You can imagine it's a shock to our parents and coaches when our teams venture out into the community travel league Now that I'm club president I've fleshed out the content of the slides we present at our inhouse coaches meeting to say something along the lines of "limit your coaching points to substitutions and water breaks, let the players make the decisions on the field."
Subs? Water breaks? What are those? I had no subs this past weekend, and we got no water break except halftime. Still won, though! Thanks for the report of a real-life example of such rules. They're probably rare. And while I somewhat agree with that in principle, I do feel that some instruction during the game can be valuable. Unless you have ample opportunities to coach the players in full-sided game-condition scrimmages, there simply are things that will happen that you can't recreate on half a pitch with a team-and-a-half's worth of players. There, I said it. Open the floodgates....
You won't get any criticism from me. My U10Gs were 8 and 9 year olds, about a third had never played soccer before. Your players are probably soccer age 15 or 16. Different coaching objectives. I did schedule a pre-season scrimmage for training purposes but probably spent significantly less than 30 minutes total for the entire season on team tactics. Just enough to give them a simple 433 system and a context for the SSGs used during training. Strictly focused on fundamentals. No functional training. Everybody got the same training.
when i give coaches advice, i like to tell them to coach the supporting attacking players rather than the player with the ball at his feet. "give him options." "find space." "get wide." "be useful." let the player on the ball make his own decisions, but help his teammates be available for him. defensively, i have a lot more trouble not coaching the on-the-ball defender, but i still like to try, and i advise other coaches to coach the team as a whole, not the pressure defender specifically. the sink-or-swim reality of that pressure defender definitely makes it tougher on me personally to let them make their own mistakes. of course, this will all depend on age-level and competition-level of the players and team.